Hemibell, the makers of Airplane! actually bought the rights to the earlier film so that they could use lots of the dialogue from it, so it's a much closer relationship than that between most spoofs and their source material.

_____________________________

"I never understood drinking. It isn't good for your looks, and it cuts down on what you are. I never wanted to cut down on what I am." - Mae West

I personally like the remake better than the original as well. The original had elements of "The Dead Zone" in it which really dragged the movie down. I'm glad the remake took out that crap. Unfortunately both films kept the bad ending. But I certainly would take the remake any day over the original.

Ditto. I thought it was dreadful and riding on the back of the name of the original was a travesty.

Whislt I'm complaning, I thought Funny Games was dreadful too. Haven't seen the original, so can't compare like for like but what really irked me was the scene near the end of the movie where the film cheats by taking a smug turn into Sci-Fi/Fantasy terroritory in an attempt to 'have it's cake and eat it' - and lecture the audience about it's expectations. There's nothing wrong with wanting to see justice metered out - people work all week and go to see a movie to escape for a couple of hours - and part of that is seeing the bad guy meet his deserved end.

Also - the two villians had all the charisma of a lump of coal. Characterwise, either one of them would have p*ssed their pants if confronted on their own.

King bloody Kong! And to include it in the pic on the home page, come on Empire, I know you gave it 5 stars in the original review but it is possibly the worst remake in history. Terrible casting ( Watts and Black???) poor action and the effects were not great, the scene with King Kong throwing Watts around and fighting a dinosaur looks like a cartoon. Put it this way the most emotinally believable thing in the movie is a CG monkey!

I will say though the Thing at number 2 is spot on, actually I would personally put it ahead of heat.

I thought Jackson's Kong was a bad film, only saw it the once in the cinema, but for me it was too much budget and elbow room given to a director who had shown his propensity for bloating a film when given enough rope (just compare the first Lord of the Rings to the last)..

The character development, especially of the crew, seemed pointless, more like filler, as ultimately they were just fodder, compare that to the secondary character development in Heat which is much more paired down and more efficient, by showing a group meal out on both sides and other smaller examples.

The other part that lost me with Kong was the manipulation of its own rules, I'm fine for believing in a gigantic ape, or aliens, or even the plot lines in some Rom-Coms, I can suspend with the best of them, but there must be rules within that, a character can't do one thing, then not be able to do it later, or weigh a certain amount one time and not later.

There was a dinosaur stampede at one point, the darting in between the legs went beyond flash action direction into farce, same with old Watts her name being flipped around like a pancake yet lesser mortals being easily killed. It felt all together Bay-esque at times, and though the original is rough and dated it is such a seminal piece it deserved better than that.

It looked beautiful at times, especially setting it in the same era, but ultimately, for me, it felt bloated, self indulgent and even a tad pretentious, which is tricky to achieve given its genre.

Any piece of world cinema remade pretty much immediately to cater for the needs of ignorant people, unable to watch a subtitled film should not be mentioned. [REC] is a fantastic movie which is head and shoulders above the american remake.

I'm not even sure how a film 'works,' but if it can, let me know; I've got five hundred movies and a thousand hours' worth of chores to catch up on. If I had an editor's position at Empire, I would have put this laundry list of films to work catching all the little errors in this piece that make Empire as laughable as the New York Times, or a high school paper at best. There is no such thing as an "object lesson" -- a phrase appearing in one of the last ten or fifteen flicks on the list -- but rather an "abject lesson." An object lesson would be no more than a lesson in objects. This is English Language 101.

Also, to rank the King Kong remake with the reeking performances of Jack Black and Colin Hanks at a higher point in the list than Michael Mann's perfection of his own "Heat" is not a little disconcerting. Considering you've included made-for-TV originals and remakes, where in God's name was "I, Claudius"? Yet still you found room for "Disturbia," the largely forgettable Shia TheBeef vehicle which "worked" only as a harbinger of the era of Total Remakes. Just a suggestion for another list, you might take the title of every movie made in the last five years to get "50 Remakes... That are Remakes."

This article/list is amateur at best, and does little to leave its reader feeling better informed about, well, anything. Except Scorcese and Spielberg switching jobs on movies made three years apart. Fascinating.